Angle(s)

Saturday, July 13, 2013

INTERVIEW: Keith Rowe

issue 12 :: July 2007

In April 2007, Keith Rowe, who co-founded the AMM ensemble (1965),
toured the U.S. East Coast with Rick
Reed and Michael Haleta as the Voltage Spooks. Seven shows in
eight days. Immediately after, Rowe came with Reed back to Austin
to perform solo and duo, much as they did a few years ago. I had the
pleasure of interviewing Rowe the day after the show, and because
of my contacts with him on his previous three visits to Austin, I
felt a bit of comradarie which I think generated an interesting interview.
I expect people who read this interview to be familiar with Dan Warburton's
2001 Paris Transatlantic interview,
which covers Rowe's early career and general methodology. I have tried
not to duplicate any of that material. An interesting 1996 interview with Rowe can be found here, made during AMM's first visit to Austin. Thank you to John
Pham and Susanna
Bolle for the use of their Voltage Spooks photos from Boston and
NYC.

interview by Josh Ronsen, April 22, 2007

Q: How has the tour been?

ROWE: Really great. A really great time. Socially, it’s
been really nice, which I think is always important. Obviously the music
is important too, but I think to have really good traveling companions,
sympathetic people, I always find that important.

Q: Does that affect the music? If you’re in a good mood?

ROWE: I don’t really know, because I think I’ve always
avoided touring with people I don’t like. I felt confident. I think it
does [thinking about question]. The music left a lot of space for each
other, a lot of consideration, and I think we were all willing to come
in with quite strong ideas when we had them, but also to retire and
allow the others to speak, but at the same time keep three very
individual voices.

Q: You’ve talked about some AMM recordings being three
solos and not a group. How do you work to make it a group where people
aren’t assigned a rhythm or melody situation?

ROWE: Did I say three solos or three accompanists?

Q: The interview was transcribed as “soloists.”

ROWE: I think the idea was closer to 3 accompanists,
accompanying each other. I think what you would find -- and I think it
is true of the Spooks tour as well -- is there wasn’t that kind of
soloistic mentality. People didn’t tend to use soloistic vocabulary, a
vocabulary which is is already full. It doesn’t need anything else. I
think you already know this experience too, you’ll be playing with
someone.

Q: Sometimes I want to put something in the foreground and other times have something in the background.

ROWE: That’s right. Again, when you’re playing as a
soloist, a solo, you are covering all the areas in a sense. If you have
three or four people doing that simultaneously, it does get full and
unnatural. I think most of us in those circumstances would draw back for
a few moments. Partly because you’re not helping the situation
continuing what you’re doing. But also maybe what you said in a way,
that the person feels at that point the freedom to do something very
soloistic. Being sensitive to that is not a bad thing, because it gives a
dynamic to the overall picture of the music when someone does something
very strong.

Q: When you’re playing with people, how quick is your
reaction time? When someone does something, can you react, [snaps
fingers]? Or do you have to pre-plan...?

ROWE: I think your reaction times are very fast. In fact, it’s
a skill to have four or five simultaneous possibilities and you’re only
actually utilizing one of them, and you have something in the background
that you can bring out straight away. For me, I would never try to react
in that sense. I have the capability of reacting in that sense, but I
much prefer having a schema you are running through, but a schema that
has an ambiguity and open-endedness which will automatically accept almost
any other activity along side it.

Q: And you can adjust it if you need to.

ROWE: A little bit. You could be adjusting the
equalization or maybe the volume, you could push it or make it more or
less transparent, to make it work in a totality. Because obviously in
the end you are always working for the totality of what is happening
rather than what you are doing. And it’s much better in a way to
understate what you are doing. Maybe it’s better to be doing something
not so brilliant but adding to the whole in a way which makes it work.

Q: When you use electronics, delays -- and I think you have one
of those Loop Stations that Rick [Reed] uses -- you set up electronic
loops which are almost another level of playing in which you control or
conduct as a separate entity. Do you play that level, or let it play itself?

ROWE: I think they’re really dangerous. I think
the Loop Station is a dangerous thing. I think Rick is really good in
that you don’t detect he is using it. That’s the worst thing, that you
can detect it in operation. I think hiding it is best.

Q: I didn’t look at your setup last night, so I didn’t see if you were using it.

ROWE: I was, but I have a half-sized one of Rick’s. The RC-20 has a reverse. I use the RC-2.

Q: The reverse seems like the best feature...

ROWE: [laughs] Well, I think that is true. For a lot of people
the reverse is the feature they really like. I think the problem with
that is that it becomes a kind of trap. I would say one of the things
that always needs to be avoided in music is affectation. And I think these
have the possibility of becoming an affectation.

Q: Where it becomes recognizable what it is?

ROWE: Well, it drives you towards making convincing, interesting
music, and then I think it becomes almost a crutch. I’m not saying it
is, but there is a danger. The test of that is to not have it, then you
see how much you’ve come to rely on pressing this button for an effect.
I think that will continually take away from the process of making music.

Q: When you use electronics, do you experiment to find something
to use, or do you use them because you want a certain feature?

ROWE: The thing is, the electronics, and I’m not absolutely sure
about this, allow for a degree of abstraction in music which somehow I
never felt was there with acoustic instruments. Maybe it is only the difference
between lyrical and hard-edged abstraction, but there is something about
the abstraction which really attracted me right from an early age. I think
with the abstraction, because you don’t have a lot of the other craft/technique
elements with electronics, you can have a degree of fluidity in what you’re
doing which I really enjoy. I think electronics allows a modular approach
to music as human performance and to reroute stuff not only completely
fresh before you start but also during the performance. David Tudor was
the great genius at that.

Q: With his matrix switcher...

ROWE: Yeah. We do it differently with 1/4” jack leads.

Q: Do you rehearse with different orders of the electronics [plugging the electronics in different orders]?

ROWE: No, I never do. I usually have an idea about it, I
have a book. I would think “I wonder if I put the telephone pickup coil
into the Loop Station?” What is the possibility of that?

Q: And then you do that during performance?

ROWE: No, I get the idea sitting on the bus of waking up in the
morning or cooking. I'm constantly churning stuff over. And then I try
to remember it long enough to write it down. I forget loads of stuff.
I might in the afternoon during sound check, I might try it. But the sound
check is part of the playing. But I wouldn’t rehearse it to death. I don’t
sit at home... I never never never at home put stuff on the table and
rehearse.

Q: I don’t know if you remember, but when you [and
Toshimaru Nakamura] gave the workshop [in Austin], it was in 2002 or
2003, you admonished us for fidgeting around on our instruments at home.
You said it cheapens the sound or the music-

ROWE: The relationship. It dilutes the relationship between you and the instrument.

Q: Because it is no longer a special relationship?

ROWE: I think it becomes very informal. It has the
potential to become very lazy and you teach your muscle memory bad
habits. The possibility of bad habits creeping in, unless you’re very
strict, just laying back on the sofa playing away.

Q: Because you are not devoting all of yourself to playing?

ROWE: Exactly. I think it is the concentration. But that’s just my quirk. I’m sure people stumble across stuff by doing that.

Q: I’m guilty of that.

ROWE: What? Stumbling across or...?

Q: Both. But just keeping the calluses [on fingers] up...

ROWE: Because I don’t play the guitar like that, calluses are
not an issue. I try to strip the music of all of the craft elements.

Q: You never use your fingers to fret notes?

ROWE: Very, very rarely. I did last night, a little bit. I
wanted to make a sound, more like human sounds, just rubbing the
strings with fingers, but there is no pressure, a very light touch. In
fact, it’s a very light touch because the guitar is amplifying, with
contact microphones. It’s also laying flat on a table which is
resonating as well, the whole surface is vibrating, so the lightest
touch on the strings can make a thunderous sound.

Q: I always loved the story about the Japanese Zen Master who
could produce vibrato just from varying the blood pressure in his fingers.

ROWE: I have my own version of that in my “pan scrubber” period,
when I used, for about four years, a stainless steel wool pad. If you
crank up the pickup very high so each sound is really magnified and you
put the pad on the pickup and hold it really still, you can hear the blood
coming through. If you can control the blood flow by holding your breath
or slowing down. A couple of times I have used that notion of hearing
the blood flow. And the brillo pad on the pickup is not Zen [laughs],
but it is an idea reminiscent of that.

Q: Rick used to play guitar and that was one of his techniques.

ROWE: I stopped doing it. I remember playing in Berlin in
a small club and I think there were three sets. I was setting up my
table and I looked down and I saw -- I’m not joking -- fifteen brillo
pads on various tables. So I threw mine away and haven’t used any since.

Q: What are you using the laptop [a G4 PowerBook] for?

ROWE: It come from an old idea. Obviously it is a found
object, you can treat it like an object like anything else, and it has
very rich possibilities outside of its normal music [capabilities]. I
was inspired by a quote from Nicolas Poussin, a painter from the 1600s. I
mentioned him last night [in his spoken introduction to his solo set].

In a letter he wrote “I who make a profession of mute things,”
which always struck me as a fantastic way of describing the role of an
artist. There is an inherent muteness about things that an artist brings
out the possibilities from muteness. With the computer I use a
telephone pickup coil and try to explore all of the sonic debris the
keyboard throws up, and also the Bluetooth [wireless] mouse. Last night I
had the pickup coil on top of the mouse and operated it as a mouse, say
to launch a program, Reactor, and didn’t take any audio from that. The
mouse chatters [to the computer]. Positioning the pickup coil on top of
the keyboard then I am able to pickup this chatter. Then if I run that
through the Loop Station and run it through the PS-3 and change the
pitch...

Q: You pick up the hard drive sounds?

ROWE: Yeah, in fact, it’s just one of those things I just do
once. When I was fresh into using it, it [went into standby mode] halfway
through the performance and the whole motor went [makes winding down noise],
but very gracefully, absolutely beautiful. So at the end of the performance
I turned it off by holding down the power button and had the pickup where
I reckoned it produces sound. Fantastic. But that could become a signature
sound so I hope I would never do it again.

Q: I don’t know about your Mac, but some models have a built-in microphone and I have seen people use it in performance.

ROWE: Mattin.

Q: Aaron Russell did something really beautiful where he bowed the shell of the laptop and this was picked up by the mic.

ROWE: Bowed laptop. The bowed laptop ensemble [laughs].

Q: Do you use that feature at all?

ROWE: No. For me that is someone else’s idea. I would try
never to steal or appropriate someone else’s idea. I would always want
to work it out myself.

Q: Are you using the computer programs like Reactor, are you making computer music?

ROWE: I don’t very much. When I first got it, I tried
using it but it was so slow. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed really
really slow.

Q: It is almost like you have to compose something in advance. Or you can improvise with pre-made material.

ROWE: I wouldn’t rule out using the sound capabilities at some point, but just at the moment I find it slow.

Q: And you still prefer direct manipulation.

ROWE: Yeah. I don’t suppose I will do that forever either. There
is lots of other stuff which is equally interesting. CD players or iPods,
use the platter from the iPod, one of them that has a hard drive [as opposed
to flash memory]

Q: I have read instructions how to send music signals to hard
drive motors to turn the actual spinning of the hard drive platter into
a speaker.

Q: How do you approach playing with someone new? You’ve played with Rick once before. Have you ever played with Michael?

ROWE: I had about two years ago in Maryland. We did a performance of [Cardew’s] Treatise together. Obviously when you play with someone for the first time, you usually have an idea of what they’re about.

pages 94-115 of Treatise

Q: ‘Cause you’ve heard their stuff?

ROWE: Yeah, but just recently I played with a laptop musician
I knew nothing about. He did the first set and I did the second set and
then we did a brief collaboration, so I got an idea from that, but sometimes
people for their solo set have a completely different approach to live
improvisation, probably good, too, I think. But it was odd because his
solo set was very convincing, but when it came to the improvisation [with
me], I think what I’ve been saying now, I really think the computer wasn’t
fast enough, or whatever he was doing, wasn’t fast enough to interact
in a sense. I felt he was running a program and I was decorating it. There
is a natural kind of tentative nature, I think that is one thing that
obviously happens, you both try not to get in each other’s way, try not
to step on each other’s feet, try to leave space for the other person.
And that can lead to a tentative and weak environment, and so much so
that on this occasion after ten minutes I thought, “either I’m going to
sit here and make a completely pathetic evening of music, or I can push
it,” which I did. The kind of overplaying I wouldn’t normally do. But
that just woke the relationship up and I think I gave him the confidence
to come back at me and [he thought] “he’s making a lot of noise, so I
can.” I think sometimes not to make a lot of noise, not to have a lot
of activity you have to have confidence. It has always seemed to me, you
have to be more confident in what you do to be able to use less material
and the more material you use can be a feature of insecurity. It doesn’t
have to be; I’m not saying it is a mechanical relationship but
I think it is often the case, people over compensate. The danger is playing
too much so that you’re not sensing the actual environment you’re in.
For me, the most important things that you find in the room, in the space,
is continually changing. Like last night in the first half, the space
was a certain kind of space and then after intermission, as I sat down
to play I felt that the space was very different. Not good or bad or anything
like that, but just a different kind of feel of space, a tactile sense
of space.

Q: In relation to being in back of the room and watching Rick and then coming to the front of the room?

ROWE: Partly it is the psychology of the people there which you
can obviously sense, you can sense the kind of attention people are bringing
to it. When you’re primarily using visual material, because we are primarily
visual animals, the concentration of the [audience] is visual, and in
fact when there is no visual there seems to be a process around the irises,
scratching around, looking to derive information, which is not there.
And what one would think would happen that the ears become more active,
but the ears begin to close down. But if you have a visual image and a
high volume. The ears are closing down from the volume and also closing
down from the eyes taking most of the concentration. So I think that needs
a particular kind of awareness from [the audience]. So often the intermission
is totally different. I just sense it was different. And that was why
I choose to talk a little to try to negotiate that different. And then
playing, the first five minutes is just exploring the space, bringing
up a soft drone as a way of probing and when it came back, I knew that
what I had done was to pull people’s concentration in the sound. I think
prior to that it didn’t feel very good. They were still trying to locate
themselves in the space. A performance is a collaboration between everyone
who is there and the room itself, the quality of the room, the expectations
of the people and their actual concentration; it seems to be tangible.

Q: You’ve played in the room twice before, plus given a
workshop, you have a history with this room. Have you ever played to
video like Rick did?

ROWE: I just did a tour of Portugal with a video artist from Oslo. It’s hard.

Q: To make music that fits the video?

ROWE: Well, I can do that easily. He uses a lot of flicker, generated
flicker images, nonobjective images so they are abstractions. We each
have an analog monitor on our tables. And what I do is use different pickup
coils and radios, like long-wave radios, most television monitors you
will pick up the monitor’s process, where it is trying to hold the image
in sync around the edge of the screen, you can pick that up very strongly.
You can explore the top part of the monitor, you get a very hard-edged
sync with the flicking image. He then takes a an audio feed which he puts
into his Doppler which changes the flicker rates which then change the
sound. So we have a loop. It’s a very hard-edged electronic sound. It’s
quite punchy. Sometimes I’ll break away from that and do something contrary.
It gets very intense.

Q: And you run this through your effects?

ROWE: Yeas. We were given some money by a Norwegian arts association
to spend a week away to experiment with the relationship between radio
waves and monitors. It gave me a big headache at the end [taps on table].
But it’s wonderful to combine short-wave possibilities, exploring the
different aspects of the sync locking, very extraordinary sounds.

Q: That’s a different way of working with visual material
than... you make compositions using elements from people’s paintings.
How do you interpret those elements? For example, the compositions for
MIMEO.

ROWE: Last night I did something based on the Rothko paintings
in the room in London, and in Houston. In MIMEO we’ve also done versions
of Rothko in a different way. Looking at a Rothko, I think of two elements,
the high pitch and the low pitch, the upper part of the frame, [and the
lower]. The instructions are always simple for these painting works, at
least for Rothko, the hard, hard Rothko, without any consultation from
the other people you hit either a very high frequency or a very low, and
without any sense of degradation or deviation, hold that pitch at a very
loud volume for an hour and then stop. So it is like being inside a 747
engine [laughs]. For me, it was to express something that’s almost hidden
in Rothko, the terror, the sheer terror of the painting, the terror of
the process and the way the process partly causes suicide. All the difficulties
of making that, for him. I think Rothko reopened things, like Feldman,
very soft and green, and I think a romanticized version of it, and understandably
so. And we have a soft in Rothko, which is the same instruction choose
a high or low frequency and play it incredibly soft for an hour. The Caravaggio
we used,“The Taking of Christ,” (1602) which was a lost Caravaggio and
only recently rediscovered. It is too complicated to explain
now, but there is scheme involving John Tilbury as the Christ figure,
the acoustic instrument surrounded by electronic ones, and the electronics
betraying the acoustic instrument. John Tilbury is actually betrayed inside
the piano [Cor Fuhler performing directly on the piano strings], his ability
to move is restricted. But not aggressively, no one is trying to stop
him.

Q: Is he aware of this, like Christ, does he know the betrayal is coming?

ROWE: We talked about it, but I'm not sure. I thought he was,
but maybe I didn't make it clear enough. I gave him drawings of the hands.
In the painting the hands of Christ are fairly uniform in composition,
which is usually interpreted as resignation, and I encouraged John to
use that hand. In the performance I imagine he must have known, because
we had a press release, and it was in the program and we had a press conference
the day before. John was there; we all discussed it. The last painting
project with MIMEO we did, we just finished it and it will be released
in a few weeks is based on Cy Twombly.

As you know, Twombly was a cryptologist
in the army and part of that he had to be able to work under difficult
circumstances which involved being in the dark. And you know the legend
of painting blindfolded and using the wrong hand... I thought about how
we could do a version of that in MIMEO, so what I got people to do was
each person in their home take a 60 minute CD-R and put onto this about
2 minutes of music, 2 minutes of sound, spread over the one hour of time,
and while doing this, think about what the others could be doing, but
obviously not knowing, and to be considerate of the other people, and
think about Cy Twombly's paintings. Everyone then sent their CD-R to Marcus
Schmickler, who piled them on top of each other without listening to them,
and then sent the master, having not listened to it, to the record label
[Cathnor],
who agreed to print it without listening to it. So the label boss, Richard
Pinnell, his idea is to go to [Sound] 323 and buy it over the counter
and listen to it.

Q: Can the people at the plant listen to it, to master it?

ROWE: I don't want to make a fetish of it, but the idea
was that none of us should listen to it. So it is like taking the
blindfold off and you have the work.

Q: Are you playing blindfolded, or with the wrong hand?

ROWE: AMM was often played [lost to tape change], and in
the Scratch Orchestra we had a piece called “Houdini Rite” where you’re
all tied up with rope. For example, you could do Rachmaninoff’s Piano
Concerto No. 2 with John Tilbury at the piano with his hands tied behind
his back.

Q: Was he playing backwards?

ROWE: He tried [laughs].

Q: Rothko and Caravaggio are interesting together because
of their intensities, Caravaggio’s black backgrounds and Rothko’s color
fields. Do you see a link between that?

ROWE: That’s right. Particularly in a Rothko. I think Rothko
said the ideal viewing distance is eighteen inches from the surface of
the canvas. Eighteen inches and you’re totally immersed in it, it is an
intense viewpoint, there is nothing else in your world when you are that
close to it. So the high volume comes from that in a sense. For the question
of the color in Caravaggio, we talked a little about that fact that Caravaggio
hardly ever used blue in his paintings, which is odd given where he lived
[Rome], but what we worked on more was the black and white, the contrast,
the tonal quality of the painting rather than the dramatic. In fact, what
we used, if you look at “The Taking of Christ,” it’s almost like a photographer’s
flash, a scoop photograph of an arrest. It’s almost a 1600’s version of
some famous person being arrested. So, slightly humorously, we used flash
guns in the performance to trigger interference in the radios. It’s a
technique that Jérôme Noetinger particularly used over the years. The
flashes replicated that technique of painting, that very hard tonal quality.

Q: There is a Caravaggio in Fort Worth, if you ever go there. It’s an early one, the one of the girl stealing the boy’s ring.

ROWE: His paintings often have tricksters and card sharps [actually,
“The Cardsharps” is the Caravaggio at the Kimbell -Ed.], people stealing
something.

Q: There’s always a sense of story, not just people displayed.

ROWE: That was one of the things about the taking of
Christ, is that you have a sense of animation of the profiles. In fact,
everyone is in profile except for Christ. You can imagine making an
animated film of the hands. And in the painting there are references to
earlier works, the fleeing nun on the left hand side is taken from an
earlier painting.

Q: Have you thought about turning your paintings into music?

ROWE: In a sense, I’ve always considered what I do on the guitar as an act of painting. At the very least the process of painting.

Q: The physical gestures?

ROWE: No, the process from the ground upwards. For example. in
the world of musical arts, I can change... and I think this is one contribution
in our area of music, I think in the world of music generally speaking,
originality is not something on top of the list. If you go to conservatory,
originality is not what music is about. Not a particularly good idea,
I think. In rock and roll you have a little notion of originality, you
try to find the new sound, but there is also a lot of copying, a lot of
product. But in the music we make, there is much more a notion of originality.
Finding your own voice is a major part, and for a lot of people, the most
important part. So I think I had that idea right from the start, certainly
in the early to mid ‘60s. I thought my primary responsibility was to find
a new angle for the instrument, like in painting, searching for a new
angle. That’s what you do in art school. I’ve always considered what I’ve
done is painting, and for me it is the perfect painting, there is no commodity,
it can’t be traded like a painting can. Improvisation was a perfect way
of making a painting, so I could be concerned with all the issues of painting.

Q: Does that imply that an improvisation is one distinct thing that you build up through layers or through time?

ROWE: Yes. There is a slight problem there because if you line
ten or fifteen Rothkos up, you could say they all look the same, like
oak trees all look the same. But the trees are all different, and I think
improvisations can be like that. I think that is quite legitimate to have
the improvisations to be very same-y. And you might not have always caught
me saying that, at one point I might have said that they should all be
different. But I think there should be that possibility. When you go to
hear a Haydn string quartet, there are no surprises, are there? In terms
of newness. People listen for the exquisite exposition of the quartet.
They have a Haydn-esque quality to them, they’re always Haydn. Same with
Schubert. Maybe we have in our maturity, as a group of people working
on this music, as a community, what we have to think about this issue
of newness, of freshness, and maybe there is also room for repeating something,
what you’re getting involved in is the exquisite nature of this exposition
rather than the newness. It still seems to be in the air where everyone
needs to be creating new stuff all the time. I have no dogmatic stand
on this, I’m not thumping the table, but it does seem to me that we should
be thinking about it.

Q: How much new music do you listen to? I’m sure people send you things all the time. In fact, I’m about to give you something.

ROWE:
Quite a lot. I think it is still vibrant, the world that we’re in,
people are working hard, very conscientiously. Of course, there are some
people who think we’re going through a crisis at the moment. In a way,
if we do have a problem, we need more people who have spent time in
classical music, as opposed to the people who have been brought up on
rock and roll. One of the important things in AMM was the inviting of
classical performers. This was important for us. I think it true of our
whole scene. We badly need people who have another kind of perspective.

Q: What about from other cultures?

ROWE:
Oh, there are many from painting, aren’t there? Voltage Spooks, three
people from art schools, art backgrounds. Just last night, two or three
people I talked to were art students. It seems there is a lot when it
comes to people involved in the visual arts. I think there is a real
connection between the visual arts and the way the visual arts have
developed and this type of music, this approach to music.

Q: And other geographic cultures, the Middle East, for example?

ROWE:
Well, that will come, presumably, because we saw the effect the
Japanese had on the scene, pretty dramatic, almost as dramatic as the G3
computer appearing.

Q: I was surprised to find there was a lot of performance art from Japan in the 1950’s, which is rarely discussed.

ROWE: I think there were a lot of interesting developments around,
from Italy, Japan, people like Kosugi, and Toshi Ichiyanagi. I think there
have been a couple of movements which have passed us by, I think we could
have derived more from them, like Fluxus. I think we’re still very much
orientated towards a traditional way of performance.

Q: Last year you worked with Bill Thompson in Scotland. He’s one of our friends who moved away. What did you do with him?

ROWE: I worked in a festival right in the center of England called
Darby, and we did Treatise, some sound recording, "Pondlife"
with Lee Paterson, very interesting. And later in the year, in November,
I went to Bill’s sound conference in Aberdeen. I went up and played with
2 musicians from the Indian subcontinent, Rohan
de Saram [cello] and Rajesh
Mehta [trumpet], and that was actually very different to be playing
with them. Raga is a very different way of approaching the instrument
than the normal, European improviser.

Q: I imagine they were more familiar with Western traditions than you with Indian traditions.

ROWE: Absolutely. Rohan spent his whole life in the
Arditti String Quartet, so he knows all that inside-out, backwards,
upside-down, reverse. Rajesh has a multi-arts discipline, deeply rooted
in the Indian tradition, too. Which, the Indian tradition, SriLankin
improvisation has always been a very strong part of the culture, hence a
very strong part of the classical music, too. For them, improvising is
very normal.

Q: Indian improvisation has certain restrictions, just
like our improvisations, a raga uses a particular scale, uses a
particular rhythm at the beginning and a different one at the end...

ROWE: I think our restrictions are obviously different,
but are equally important. I think the restrictions are more important
than the freedoms, in a way. One restriction which I would go so far as
to say is absolutely essential is that there should be a reason for
everything you do. In the world of painting, the expression would be
every brush stroke has to be justified. Somehow, in our music, we seem
to be terribly wasteful, we have lots of stuff which isn’t absolutely
needed.

Q: I know you are influenced by Jackson Pollock. How is the flicking/splattering
of paint justified? Or was it just the passion behind his actions?

ROWE: The genre, not always--some of the drip works are
just one or two lines, almost like calligraphy. Take John Coltrane with
the “sheets of sound,” I don’t feel there is any superfluous material in
there at all. He put into it what it needed to have that sensation that
he wanted. I think it is always like that. All I am saying, we should
think about that a bit more. We should think about justifying
everything.

Q: And thing brings us back to your admonishments against fidgeting. I forget the actual word you used [in the Austin workshop].

Q: I haven’t done my own translation from the French, but
it seems he is attacking you for having a personal style, listening to
the people you play with and releasing CDs.

ROWE: I would have to admit, I haven’t read the French version.
I only read it the day before it was released. I got an email from Mattin
the afternoon before the release and said this title it coming out and
hoping I wouldn’t be offended. So I wrote back and said, I wouldn’t be
offended if it were intellectually coherent. And then he sent me a link
to the text and I read through it pretty quickly. I felt intellectually
irritated and annoyed, insulted by the lack of rigor in the discussion.
Particularly that he used “Stockhausen
Serves Imperialism” as a launching pad for this in the title. If you
read Cornelius’ essay, whether if you agree with it or not is another
issue, if my memory serves me right, why he says Stockhausen serves imperialism
is that Stockhausen 1) detaches himself from the progressive avant-garde,
2) in the manner of the notation changes the relationship between him
and the performer, and 3) goes around talking a lot of mumbo-jumbo, which
maybe has something to do with religion. There are some real issues there,
about whether you detach yourself from the progressive avant-garde, what
does that mean, why would you do that, what are the consequences of doing
that? The way you change your relationship through the notion with the
performer? I can see how the concepts of arrogance, godliness, I’m not
saying fascism, but you can see the issues there. there are issues to
be discussed, whether you agree or not. And then the whole thing of justifying
your work and these kind of extraterrestrial backgrounds, again there
is something to be discussed. I think there is something there. When I
read the [Mattin] I felt it was really cheap, nasty stuff. Maybe I shouldn’t
say this, but sometimes I think it is not me they are getting at. I wish
they were more honest. I think they are having a go at Jon Abbey [Erstwhile
Records], partly because he’s American and partly because he spent
his own money on promoting a label. I see much more to do with that than
anything I’ve done. Personally, I don’t think I have served imperialism.
If I have, I would like to see the evidence.

Q: Not more than any of us do.

ROWE: Not any more or less than the next guy.

Q: This is something I think of myself, but I going to point
my finger at you, but having an Apple laptop, using these electronic devices,
releasing CDs... there is no alternative mode to doing that kind of stuff.
Having an Apple laptop means there are people in Singapore or where ever
who are getting paid a dollar a week to make these components. There is
no way to get around that if you want access to this advanced technology.
Do you ever think about those aspects?

ROWE: Of course, and in fact [my] last solo CD, “Harsh,” was
about that, was about the ability of harshness in our genes, the slave
labor, the harshness of that is invisible. I think our lives implicated
in a way. Clearly. In Nantes, there is quite a strong movement for Linux,
anti-Bill Gates, anti-Macintosh. Downloading, only using open-source software.

Q: But you still have to run that on chips which you can’t make yourself.

ROWE: No, but in the end, they would say you have to do
the best you can. I really don’t have a problem with it either way,
within limits, of course. I think maybe both of us would not buy
software from a company which we knew was contributing to an Italian
Fascist march or something. I think there probably are things we could
do if we know, but it’s a big mess. You just have to do the best you
can. If you don’t run an Apple Mac, you’re taking a risk there...

Q: If I want to be a progressive Leftist, do I have to
carve my own instrument? Generate my own electricity? I don’t have
answers for myself.

ROWE: No, like you, I’m aware of what the issues are. I’m
also aware that one can delude oneself into thinking that you’re making
a some very big statement about it and actually it wouldn’t matter a
hill of beans. I can see that possibility too. Maybe in the comfort of
your own home, you can feel very righteous in a sense. It’s like coming
to America, because primarily because of the war in Iraq. But then I
look at it differently. I come to Austin, Texas in a way to support the
people who I want to support in that culture, which is actually in
opposition to a the culture that supports the war, those families, those
political institutions. I think to do a Voltage Spooks tour with these
guys in seven cities supports those alternative cultures. I feel that’s
what I will do. I really understand the other view, not to come to
America. You have to make a choice. I’m not going to be sanctimonious
about what I’m doing.

In June, Rowe returned to Texas, to perform at the Rothko Chapel
in Houston. Loren Connors and then Rowe performed solo sets I cannot
describe. Being in the Rothko Chapel with 160 other lovers of music,
hearing Rowe exceed himself, hearing Connors' beautiful phrases and
shimmering chords was a magical experience. The show was arranged
by Dave Dove, the trombonist and teacher.